Student letter protests College investments
By Noah Reichblum, The Dartmouth Staff
Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Ten students marched on Parkhurst Hall Monday morning to deliver a letter in protest of the College’s investment in HEI Hotels and Resorts, a hospitality and management company accused of unfair labor practices and discouraging worker unionization.
The letter, addressed to Board of Trustees, high-level administrators and the Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility, was the first step in a campaign urging the College to join Yale University and Brown University in publicly renouncing future investments in HEI, according Nathan Gusdorf ’12, one of the event’s organizers.
The 10 students attempted to personally deliver letters to College President Jim Yong Kim, Executive Vice President Steven Kadish, Provost Carol Folt and Dean of the College Charlotte Johnson. All administrators were busy or in meetings when the students arrived at 8:30 a.m. Secretaries or administrative assistants collected the copies of the letter, according to Janet Kim ’13, the event’s other organizer.
“We wanted to get in early in the morning and make a swift statement at the beginning of the week and the administrator’s day,” Janet Kim said.
Stewart Towle ’12 and Gusdorf led the group in chants prior to and after dropping off the letter.
HEI has faced a number of labor accusations in recent years, the most recent of which involved the HEI-managed Embassy Suites in Irvine, Calif. The California State Labor Commission found the company guilty of denying required rest breaks to eight employees and ordered the company to pay $41,000 in compensation, according to a press release from the labor rights group Unite Here. HEI was similarly found guilty of illegal retaliatory practices by a Massachusetts court in 2011 and received multiple National Labor Relations Board complaints in 2008, the press release said.
The College’s HEI investment fund is up for reinvestment in August, at which point the group of protesters hopes the College will end their support of HEI, according to Gusdorf. Janet Kim said the letter drop-off was the first step in an “escalation plan.”
“According to how the administration responds we’re hoping to apply pressure points in terms of really achieving our end goal of the campaign,” Kim said. “It’s a series of tactics,” she said.
Kim said the campaign will begin to raise awareness by tabling, campaigning, protesting and possibly staging a sit-in if the administration does not respond soon. Gusdorf said that delivering the letter was an essential first step.
“The reason we marched into the administration building is because this a demand,” Gusdorf said. “We want to show we’re willing to demonstrate and advocate in order to bring about this decision.”
The group’s actions will be largely dictated by the College’s response, according to Gusdorf.
“We expect to hear from you by Thursday, March 1,” the letter said. “In light of the upcoming Board of Trustees meeting, and the other universities that have recently declared their intent not to invest, we expect a decision to be made about this matter by March 15, 2012.”
If the group does not receive a response, the students plan to hold a protest on Saturday with at least 20 to 25 students to coincide with the Board of Trustees meeting March 2-3, Gusdorf said.
Cornell University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College and Vanderbilt University have also stated that they do not plan to invest in HEI, according to letter.
Out of the 10 students who delivered the letter, the majority are involved in Occupy Dartmouth, Students Stand with Staff, the Dartmouth affiliate of United Students Against Sweatshops or a combination of all three.
The movement protesting HEI aims to increase its support from a core group of five to 15 people to a larger ally group of 20 to 40 people, according to Janet Kim.
“As Occupy Dartmouth came together, we were able to galvanize and solidify our own activist coalition at Dartmouth,” Gusdorf said. “As we took down the Occupy tent, we could move on to some political campaigns and we’re now seeing the output of that.”
Dartmouth students first came in contact with United Students Against Sweatshops during the organization’s Northeast regional meeting this past fall, according to Kim. After talking with Brown students who had successfully convinced their university to be the first school to publicly end all future investments in HEI, Dartmouth students began to organize a campaign.
Nine students traveled to Wisconsin on Feb. 17 to attend the United Students Against Sweatshops’ 15th annual conference.
Deanna Portero ’12, who went to the conference and was also involved in Monday’s protest, said she met an HEI worker and learned about its managerial practices first-hand.
At the meeting, students held conference calls with national organizers and HEI workers, Janet Kim said.
“It’s an issue for students to tackle,” Lily Brown ’15, a member of Occupy Dartmouth and part of Monday’s event, said.
The conference, coupled with Princeton University’s private announcement to students last week that the school has no current plans to renew their investment in HEI this upcoming August, gave Dartmouth’s group enough momentum to begin its campaign on Monday, according to Kim.
The campaign to end Princeton’s investments in HEI lasted three years, according to Brown.
The actual level of the College’s involvement with HEI is unclear due to privacy rules, but Dartmouth is one of the company’s top investors, according to Kim.
Gusdorf said that according to his general understanding of Dartmouth’s relationship with HEI, Dartmouth invests money in HEI’s private equity fund. HEI in turn uses the funds to buy hotel and resort properties, he said. When the properties are sold, Dartmouth collects a portion of the profit.
“One of the big issues is that we don’t exactly know what Dartmouth invests in,” Gusdorf said.
This, of course, would have no impact whatsoever on the stock price of HEI.
By Humble Economist on Feb 28 | 10:17 am
Those of us who follow this administration know that its investments in HEI is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to crooked and corrupt investment practices. If Dartmouth’s endowment was well-managed by professionals, instead of lifelong bureaucrats with no record of achievement or success, then there would be no budget crisis. Instead, former CFO Adam Keller, who had a Masters in Public Health and no financial experience, chose to ignore all advice and not safeguard Dartmouth’s gains – all for his own personal interest.
Further, VP for Fiscal Affairs Julie Dolan was intimately involved in interest rate swaps and risky derivative play, losing the College $43,014,000.
It is about time Dartmouth stop investing in criminal organizations and start revealing every investment available. They have failed to respond to the Student Assembly’s resolution for an open and clear budget set forth by Travis Blalock and have continued to make us pay more and get less. Someone needs to resign because Dartmouth is upside down.
By Concerned 12 on Feb 28 | 11:07 am
It’s pretty hard to replace large investors.. Especially when they are fleeing en masse as the investment carries evident political and ethical issues.
Sorry humble economist, even supposing that there are “stock prices” for this fund, how could deciding not to buy our regular millions of dollars in stock NOT affect the fund value in the light of, at best, stagnant demand?
By Anonymous on Feb 28 | 11:35 am
10 people don’t like HEI because it doesn’t toe the socialist line of the SEIU. Too damn bad. If the College toed the leftist line in the endowment, the money in the endowment, where that money came from and where all the new money is coming from, Dartmouth College wouldn’t exist. The 10 students would be at a government facility of supposed learning and they would be whining and busy-bodying about that. If any or all of the 10 students have any Apple products, they need to throw them away immediately because they weren’t made with the SEIU or any other union in mind, they were made in a Communist country. Is that why it’s OK with them to own Apple products? Because they are made with labor paid $20 a day at most? This is an anti-market political attack on the funding of the College. Here go the “Occupy Wall Street” people again. For the 10 people, here’s a suggestion, shut yourselves off from the markets and see how you all get along whining then. North Korea is market-free for instance, you aren’t complaining about their investments because they don’t have any, if that’s what you want, have the guts to come out and say so, so we’ll all know exactly who you are. Left wing know-nothings.
By Not on Feb 28 | 5:15 pm
HEI has $1.2 billion dollars in investments. How much of that is Dartmouth money?
By Anon on Feb 28 | 5:18 pm
You don’t have to be on the left to think that people should be free to organize. Freedom of assembly is an incredibly important right, and cannot be trampled simply because someone has business interests in conflict with them.
If we believe in the private markets, we must also believe in voting with our wallets. That is the only way the private market can be a race to the top: balancing pursuit of profit with a social conscience.
By @Not on Feb 28 | 11:28 pm
To: Anonymous
If you had to live the life of some of these HEI employees for even a single day – never mind years on end – you’d change your tune mighty quick. It’s certainly reprehensible what Apple has allowed to take place where its products are manufactured, especially since they’ve stated that labor costs are not a significant consideration in their sourcing from China, but that doesn’t have bearing on whether universities should invest in companies which are determined to exploit their employees. Presumably there’s been dialogue between HEI and the universities which are discontinuing their funding of its acquisitions, with HEI not being responsive to concerns raised. If Apple had that same attitude, it too should be shunned.
By Aryt Alasti on Mar 3 | 5:44 am